Nonverbal communication in the classroom (between students and instructor) - Term Paper Example

All things communicate and this includes material, time systems and physical space. Whereas it’s easy to turn off verbal communication, non-verbal can’t be easily done away with. The purpose of this paper is to explore how non-verbal communication affects or relates to what is happening in the classroom especially between the student and the instructor and try and look at how it can be understood and have different meanings. There has been an overemphasis on verbal communication in the classroom and early research primarily focused entirely on the verbal interaction taking place between the teacher and student.

However within a period of the last three and half decades, practitioners, researchers and scholars have realized the relevance that non-verbal communication has in the classroom. It has been researched and proven that non-verbal component part of communication is as crucial as verbal when it comes to instructor-student relationship(Ambady&Rosenthal,1993) However it is important to note that there is what works and what doesn’t when it comes to the typical classroom. Instructors or rather teachers have got various roles to play in the classroom so as to effectively impart their learners (students) with the pre-requisite skills and knowledge they require in a specific subject.

Some of these roles include; the role of the teacher as a speaker, moderator, manager, trainer, coordinator, controller, supervisor and helper. To be effective in all those roles listed above, a teacher must be able to exhibit the right way of communication to the class or else s/he might be mistaken or rather misunderstood. Not only is the verbal communication critical, nonverbal communication too is extremely important and it has a very huge impact to the students. Nonverbal communication serves many functions such as repetition, contradiction, substitution, complementing, accenting and regulating verbal